There comes a time when abhorrence over cruelty should be expressed spontaneously and passionately, separate from academic references, scholarly analytical theory, legal punctiliousness and political hypocrisy. There comes a time when an explicit verdict on the bestiality of state and non-state actors should be delivered in the court of common decency and universal human rights. That time is now.

Few states can escape the opprobrium of using cruelty as a form of governance. Motivated by religious dogma or political ideology, every non-state violent group has also dug deep into depravity. States and their opponents have fuelled one another: separate in opposition yet joined in derision of democracy and humanity, in refusing dialogue and applauding violence.

Two levels of officially sanctioned cruelty appear in states which sustain cruelty over long periods and in those whose apparent pleasure in such violence takes place in a time-limited period. In the first category, states which continue brutalities over time include Indonesia's oppression of West Papuans, Morocco's decades long containment of the people of Western Sahara, Israel's siege of Gaza, a Saudi Arabian penal system which subjugates women and promotes medieval-like punishments to anyone who challenges the state, the US fascination with weapons of all kinds, their specific states’ retention of capital punishment and the inevitable botched executions, the Singhalese government of Sri Lanka's continued discrimination against Tamils, the subjugation of Tibetan people and culture by Chinese takeover, Hun Sen's authoritarianism in Cambodia and Australia's imprisonment of asylum seekers on remote islands.

The distinction between brutality which either seems endless or occurs within a time frame is blurred, though a possible time limit hints at an end to cruelties and hopes that non-violent times might materialize.